Josef Weber and the politics of utopia: Between eco-socialism and prefigurative strategy

Abstract

Josef Weber (1901–1959) is remembered today for his mentorship of Murray Bookchin. However, not only are his own extensive writings neglected in the literature, but his pioneering utopian project has been almost entirely overlooked. This article examines the politics of utopia that shaped this project and suggests that Weber's critique of capitalism, state socialism, and environmental crisis can indeed be interpreted as an early eco-socialist and prefigurative form of politics. Yet, an important consequence of excavating Weber's account of politics, democracy, and socialism is that it complicates claims about the end of utopian vision in the immediate postwar period. I argue for a reading of Weber's utopianism that works between eco-socialism and prefigurative strategy, illustrating parallels with a radical realist approach to utopianism. This account of Weber's project provides a new historical lineage and contemporary justification for prefigurative eco-socialism.

Introduction

Josef Weber (1901–1959) was a political theorist, cultural critic, and communist leader in the German Trotskyist movement. After narrowly escaping Germany in 1933, he was active in the resistance effort, attended the conferences of the Fourth International in 1936 and 1938, and then fled to the United States after the German invasion of France. The central concern of Weber's wartime Marxism was to theorize imperialism as capitalism in decline. He claimed that traditional proletarian party politics was ineffective and instead called for a democratic revolution that emphasized the need for re-education and direct action. Some of his ideas disturbed prominent Trotskyites in Europe and the United States, who branded him as a bourgeois democrat and utopian. In the late 1940s, he broke with Trotskyism altogether and refocused his energy on organizing a transnational collective that published a political and literary journal out of London, New York, and Cologne. He died in 1959 of a heart attack.

Weber is remembered today for his mentorship of Murray Bookchin (Biehl, 2015; Fenner, 2025a; van der Linden, 2001). However, not only are his own extensive writings neglected in the literature, but his pioneering utopian project has been almost entirely overlooked. This article examines the politics of utopia that shaped this project and suggests that Weber's critique of capitalism, state socialism, and environmental crisis can indeed be interpreted as an early eco-socialist and prefigurative form of politics. Yet, an important consequence of excavating Weber's account of politics, democracy, and socialism is that it complicates claims about the end of utopian vision in the immediate postwar period (Hiruta, 2017; Ingram, 2017; Jacoby, 1999; Rismal, 2023). Instead, it demonstrates how utopian thinking diversifies, rather than homogenizes, radical politics in Western democracies.

Drawing on a wide range of archival and source material, I begin with Weber's early intellectual development and follow his writing while in exile in France. Based on this experience, he developed a pessimism about the role of the working class and the party vanguard in revolutionary action, which he greatly expanded upon while escaping France for the United States. For the first time, I excavate a heated debate Weber had with C.L.R James and the Johnson–Forest tendency that hinged on the role of utopia in revolutionary strategy (Bogues, 1997; Høgsbjerg, 2012; James et al., 1947; Paris, 2021). In response, Weber called for a radicalization of democracy that required the direct control of popular institutions.

Weber's later writing in the transnational collective he co-founded with other post-Trotskyist activists builds on these lessons from his interactions with US Trotskyism. In the late 1940s, however, he instead placed utopia at the forefront of the democratic movement he was organizing with the new group. Yet, this politics of utopia was also facilitated by an engagement with Max Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason (1947). While Weber admired the Frankfurt School, their openly apolitical and anti-utopian sentiments (at least in Weber's perception) produced an ideal antagonist. I reconstruct the debate that ensued in the group about how to deal with the Frankfurt School's shortcomings, conceptualize utopia, and theorize environmental crisis. Notably, when pressed by other members of the collective to defend the centrality of environmental concern to utopia, Weber anticipates contemporary eco-socialists by mining Karl Marx for a theory of social metabolism and the exhaustion of the soil.

Bringing together these threads in a final section, I argue for a reading of Weber's utopianism that works between eco-socialism (Albert, 2023; Engel-Di Mauro, 2024) and prefigurative strategy (Boggs, 1977; Raekstad, 2018b). In doing so, I suggest that it more closely parallels a radical realist approach to utopianism (Rossi, 2019; Thaler, 2018). This account of Weber's project provides a new historical lineage and contemporary justification for prefigurative eco-socialism. I conclude with an appeal to political theorists to further explore Weber's ideas and the utopian imagination of other anti-Stalinist publishing collectives in a more radical democratic and global context.

Josef Weber's early intellectual development

Josef Weber was born in the German town of Gelsenkirchen in 1901. His father was a tile-setter and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, but Weber attended a Gymnasium and then the university instead (Schneider, 1995: 7). While Weber never completed his degree, he audited courses at several universities, listening to lectures about the history of philosophy, Hegel, and Marxism. He began studying music, finally completing the exams to become a conductor, playing music in Gelsenkirchen, Essen, and Jena. He was also a passionate composer, though only one of his piano sonatas has survived.

As a teenager, Weber became increasingly involved in socialist politics in the Weimar Republic after the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in 1919. At first, he was a member of the German Communist Party (KPD) but quickly left, concerned that the KPD could not deal with the danger of fascism in Germany. Weber latched onto followers of Leon Trotsky and joined the German Left Opposition. By 1933, this new opposition brought together Trotskyist groups from over a dozen German cities, including Gelsenkirchen where Weber would have been active (Alles, 1989; Goch, 1996).

Weber collaborated closely with Otto Schüssler, who was Trotsky's secretary while in Prinkipo, a small island outside of Istanbul. Schüssler was instrumental in publishing an important pamphlet for the German Left Opposition that included a foreword by Trotsky and summarized the situation for Germany in his Leninism versus Stalinism (1933). At the last national conference of the German Trotskyists, which was held in Leipzig in March 1933, Weber and Schüssler were elected as members of the foreign committee of the renamed International Communists of Germany (IKD), the German branch of the International Left Opposition (Alexander, 1991; Lubitz and Lubitz, 2022). The foreign committee was established to ensure the political direction of the IKD and to facilitate communication with other members and factions in exile, as well as with the local Trotskyist groups operating underground within Germany. Together, Weber (as “Johre”) and Schüssler (as “Fischer”) were a powerful and later controversial leadership duo and would shape a Johre–Fischer tendency.

Swiftly persecuted later in 1933 by the Nazis in their first purges of communists, Weber had to escape unexpectedly one night when Sturmabteilung officers came to arrest him. He fled first to Amsterdam and then to Paris. Over the course of the 1930s, the various exiled groups would come together to form the Fourth International, which materialized in a series of conferences that Weber attended (Goch, 1996: 157). Their goal was to create an internationalist left opposition to Stalinism (Luparello, 2021: 29–39), with Trotsky developing his “Transitional Program” for a socialist revolution that was critical of American capitalism and the New Deal, as well as Stalinist bureaucracy (Trotsky, 1938). As a leader of the IKD, Weber was tasked with editing the German Trotskyists’ newspaper Unser Wort, and he published regularly along with his colleague Schüssler in the Paris group. Unser Wort was a propaganda platform for the ideas of Trotsky, and it brought together a large group of exiled Germans who collaborated on the project of publishing for redistribution back in Germany.

But Weber was struggling to survive in Paris. Walter Held, the first editor of Unser Wort (Broué, 1988), alerted Trotsky to Weber's difficult situation. In a bid to secure financial assistance for Weber from his American comrade Herbert Solow, Trotsky wrote:

We must save Johre [Josef Weber]. My friend writes to me that 40 dollars a month would be enough to give him the opportunity to live and work. […] I am certain that the “investment” in this matter would be most worthwhile and that the future historian of revolutionary thought will note it with gratitude (Trotsky, 1983: 46).

Furthermore, he praised Weber as “one of the most important Marxist theorists of the young generation, and not an academic theoretician, but a man who thinks politically.” Indeed, Weber and Schüssler were thinking politically about the German working class, yet to the great dismay of many of their comrades.

During this time, Weber did important resistance work documenting the opposition to the Nazification of the church in Unser Wort. The only formidable resistance against the Nazis seemed to be coming from the churches, and he advocated for Trotskyists to align with them (Biehl, 2013: 3). Weber urged supporting the churches’ resistance efforts because “politics begins where the fight over state claims and institutions themselves take place” (Weber, 1937: 1). In that sense, the Johre–Fischer tendency was being politically strategic. From what they could tell, the working class in Germany was non-existent and it made good sense to foster any kind of resistance even if it meant collaborating with democratic––as opposed to genuinely communist––forms of resistance. But this would lead them to many battles over entryism in the exiled IKD (see Lubitz and Lubitz, 2022: 2–3), and as we will see later, to an explosive rift in US Trotskyism in the 1940s.

Under these catastrophic wartime conditions, Weber and Schüssler explored the positive aspects of supporting democratic sentiments beyond a strictly working-class focus. They argued for the establishment of democracy “in all spheres, political, intellectual, scientific, philosophical, artistic, spiritual, etc., but it should not be a formal democracy, but rather a democracy of content and values” (Weber, 1938: 2 my translation). They thought that under those conditions, what was needed was to reclaim the “content of the theoretical status quo ante and raising it to the problems of the time.” While Weber's emphasis on democracy would later be perceived as bourgeois within his party (James et al., 1947), I would argue that Weber and Schüssler may be better situated within a tradition of German council communism (Kets and Muldoon, 2019; van der Linden, 2004). In fact, in Paris, they worked closely with several former council communists who joined the IKD (Bourrinet, 2017: 226).

The important insight to gleam from this time for Weber's early intellectual development is that he came to believe that the proletariat could not be the only revolutionary agent. Socialism was thus not inevitable, but rather resistance should be affected by any means necessary. For Weber, national liberation was thus a strategic way of resisting barbarism so as to create the conditions for socialist revolutionary change that were negated under the Fascist “slaughterhouse” (Weber, 1939).

After the invasion of France, Weber fled to the United States. In New York, Weber attended meetings of the Workers Party (WP) and contributed three pieces to their magazine New International. These interventions came in a heated moment for the party: it had recently split from the Socialist WP, led by James Cannon. Max Shachtman, who Weber had already featured in several issues of Unser Wort, had criticized the party structure and its position on defending the Soviet Union as a “worker's state” after the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 1939 and split away to become a powerful force in US Trotskyism (North, 1988; Price, 2016; Wald, 2017: 164–166).

It was during this moment of inner-party struggle that the first article appeared titled “The National Question in Europe: Three Theses on the European Situation” (Weber and IKD, 1942), and it had a strongly polarizing effect on the WP (Luparello, 2018). Weber responded to an ongoing concern about the “national question” in Europe in the WP and wartime Marxism in general, which concerned whether the workers’ movement should organize along internationalist lines or at the level of national struggles for democratic, political power. Weber and his comrades discussed Europe's economic trajectory since the war's onset and its effects, the nature of resistance, and revolutionary strategy.

While the party line condemned national struggles as bourgeois, Weber took a different approach. He developed the so-called “retrogression thesis” where “[n]ot only have the productive powers of mankind ceased growing, not only have technical discoveries and improvements brought about no further increase in material wealth, but economy is retrogressing” (Weber and IKD, 1942). The claim was that war would rage for the foreseeable future and that this was a sign that capitalism was in fact not a precondition of socialism: “[w]herever one looks, there are destruction, gangrene and anarchy in alarming degree which seal the catastrophe of culture.” Here, the retrogression thesis is meant as an alternative to the breakdown theory (Grossmann, 2021).

Weber argued that the workers’ movement had been demolished and that socialism could now only succeed with the inclusion of democratic demands, including national struggles that could “mobilize the masses for the final battle” (Weber and IKD, 1942). Furthermore, he argued that in a situation where Germany had perfected barbarism, enslaving Europe with forced “aryanisation,” the only hope for international socialism was to take a less abstract theory of proletarian leadership and cater to the actual situation across Europe. An attempt to rebuild the labor movement should guide a more inclusive national politics of democracy. While this went against standard Marxist theory, the IKD would continue to defend its position (against internal members) as an essentially strategic claim.

A second article made their deviating position even clearer. In “Capitalist Barbarism or Socialism”, Weber further clarified the retrogression thesis (Weber and IKD, 1944), and it was this article that influenced a minority group of Trotskyists sympathetic to the basic idea, in particular drawing in a young Murray Bookchin. Weber was now extending his theory of crisis, arguing that even imperialism had run its course, and crucially, couched his argument within Luxemburg's “socialism or barbarism” dichotomy, but with a twist: Barbarism had already descended, and resistance was meaningful in whatever form possible.

It is important to emphasize exactly what Weber is up to in this text, because he is speaking a language of imperialism, synthesizing Lenin's notion of “over-ripeness” and Luxemburg's notion of “retrogressive reproduction” (Lenin, 2010; Luxemburg, 2003). Combining these ideas, Weber argued that it was imperialism that was rotting capitalism, leading to its “inner decomposition.” Weber explicitly cites the rise of the synthetics industry as evidence of retrogressive development (Weber and IKD, 1944: 276), where the creation of new industries further points to what Luxemburg calls the “overstrained expansion of reproduction” (Luxemburg, 2003: 13) and where Lenin attributes the “over-ripeness” to “the backward state of agriculture and the poverty of the masses” (Lenin, 2010: Chapter 4). The working class ceased to be revolutionary under these conditions, and Stalinism was seen as a perverted form of state capitalist development.

Indeed, the language of imperialism dovetails with a language of catastrophe, where “the inner limit of the capacity to accumulate, growing out of its own essence, runs its course and manifests itself, precisely historically, concretely and actually, as the inability to colonize the world thoroughly” (Weber and IKD, 1944). One might find strong environmentalist undertones in Weber's writing (Biehl, 2013: 3), for example, in capitalism as “rotting,” “putrefying,” and how its retrogression is “devastating nature” (Weber and IKD, 1944: 276). But at this stage in Weber's thinking, he was not yet concerned with environmentalism. Rather, he was wrestling with his commitments to Marxist revolutionary theory under these catastrophic wartime conditions.

The dissenting position defended by Weber sparked a large controversy among his American comrades in the WP, which were already highly fragmented after splits in the early 1940s. What Weber's theory of retrogressive development did was to call Trotskyism itself into question (Biehl, 2013: 2). A major critic of Weber was C.L.R. James (1901–1989) who had worked in close proximity with the IKD group and had associated with Rudolf Klement (1908–1938), a former secretary to Trotsky and member of Weber's group in France who was tragically murdered (Cripps, 1997: 51–54). Both James and Weber attended the conferences for the Fourth International, but it is unclear whether he met Weber. He did, however, seem to have great respect for these experienced revolutionary movements, at a time when he felt that what was happening in Britain “was nothing” (James quoted in Høgsbjerg, 2017).

James, with Raya Dunayevskaya (1910–1987) and Grace Lee Boggs (1915–2015), became the Johnson–Forest tendency in the WP. They argued that the Soviet Union was now a state capitalist country, that it should not be supported as part of the WP's internationalist strategy, and that US Trotskyism should reassess Hegel, Marx, and Lenin's writings to come to terms with the status of a proletarian, revolutionary theory in the midst of the Second World War (Bogues, 1997: 57). Their dissenting position addressed the challenges confronting wartime Marxism and the working-class movement amidst the dominance of Stalinism and Fascism (James and Grimshaw, 1992: 9).

While other Trotskyists in the party focused on the crisis of revolutionary leadership and continued to champion the Fourth International, James highlighted a similar problem to Weber, namely the issue of mobilizing the proletariat (Høgsbjerg, 2012: 153). James and his comrades prepared reflections on the WP, its recent history, and inner-party disagreements in their “Balance Sheet of Trotskyism in the United States, 1940–1947” (James and Dunayevskaya, 1947) as well as a more general piece that included another major critique of the IKD in Invading Socialist Society (James et al., 1947).

The Johnson–Forest tendency countered the program of “democratic-political revolution” laid out by Weber by calling the IKD's commitment to Marxism and their reading of Marxist theory into question. James argued that the retrogressionists were creating a theoretical obscurity within the WP. To claim that the Soviet Union was still a form of socialism was for obvious reasons completely out of the question. In this vein, they argued against Shachtman, who built on the retrogressionist thesis, claiming that the Soviet Union was a form of bureaucratic collectivism, that is, a state that owns and distributes the means of production. But equally, they argued against another leader of the WP, Joseph Burnham, who argued that the Soviet Union should be seen as a “managerial society” (Burnham, 1941) suspended between capitalism and socialism (van der Linden, 2007: 79–84). Instead, James reasoned that the whole point of their tendency was to show that the Soviet Union was a form of capitalism, namely state capitalism (Bogues, 1997: 64).

Hal Draper, another prominent voice in the WP, argued that James’ “bête noire,” the IKD, was not as far from what they were arguing for after all (Draper, 1947). While the IKD believed that the decline of capitalism into barbarism represented a reversal of the conditions that fueled capitalism's ascent and James disagreed, both agreed that the Soviet Union was a form of capitalism. Nevertheless, James would claim that his response was diametrically opposed to Weber, as he discussed in a series of two direct responses to the retrogressionists of the IKD (James, 1945a, 1945b).

The criticism of the IKD was leveraged along several lines. James argued that the IKD failed to recognize the growth of productive forces that organize and discipline the proletariat, due to their abandonment of the inevitability of socialist revolution (James, 1945a). This fundamental error of the retrogressionists originated in their failure to acknowledge the advancing socialist society within the capitalist present, which while hampering the development of productive forces, did not halt their progress (James, 1945a). According to Bogues, this interaction was crucial for the early James’ notion of inevitability and his commitment to union organization (Bogues, 1997: 71).

Next, the retrogressionists neglected to understand that capitalism not only degrades workers but also instills in them the determination to overthrow the system, a crucial aspect for leading the proletariat toward revolution (James, 1945b). By prematurely advocating a “labor camp theory” and a “democratic-political revolution” amidst the flux of the Second World War, the IKD demonstrated their detachment from the ongoing historical context (James, 1945b). Here, we find James defending a belief in the spontaneous mass mobilization of the proletariat led by a vanguard organization. Later, James would abandon this “dangerous” centralist hope (Roberts, 2020), but it is crucial to understand that Weber was his major antagonist who had already abandoned any belief in the inevitability of socialism or hope that the working class could self-mobilize.

And finally, James thought the IKD adhered to outdated notions of “staged development,” which questions whether countries need to establish bourgeois states before transitioning to socialism, which James saw as irrelevant in contemporary Europe (James, 1945b). Thus, Weber's proposal to build up the party as a solution without providing practical strategies failed to effectively integrate scientific socialism with the labor movement. For James, the IKD harbored a dangerous, starry-eyed obsession with democratic slogans that constituted “a retrogression to the Utopias not even of the 19th century but of the Middle Ages” (James, 1945b).

I read this comment as providing an important contextual pressure for Weber and the later embrace of utopianism as a label for his vision of politics. Read through the lens of his biggest American critic, the problem with the IKD's defeatist stance was not just that it suggested giving up on the revolutionary socialist struggle, that is, in supporting the reinstatement of a capitalist, democratic state. Weber violated scientific socialism, taking back revolutionary theory to a form of utopianism. Weber's politics, perceived by James, was thus utopian to the extent that it gave up on an organized, internationalist agenda, arguing instead for a local form of democratic politics, socialist education in the minority, and a more gradualist form of consciousness-raising.

Weber published a detailed response to James’ position in 1946 where he challenged James’ position as being a petty-bourgeois utopian instead (Weber and I.K.D, 1946). The crisis of socialism in the WP, Weber argued, went back to the problem of utopian versus scientific socialism (Engels, 1880). What James and the Fourth International were doing wrong was committing themselves to a narrow interpretation of Marxism as “messianic,” relying on the necessity of proletarian revolution to legitimate their actions. By reducing all struggles to the level of factory organization, James and his tendency glorified a top-down form of leadership and vanguardism that alienated everyone else involved in the struggle, belittling both factory workers and intellectuals working outside of production.

Instead, a proper Marxism had to be practical and “become a reality with every step” (Weber and I.K.D, 1946: 18). The Fourth International, Weber argued, needed to acknowledge its errors and exclusionary sectarianism, which were contrary to its actual goals of achieving socialism. Instead of focusing solely on theorizing and professionalizing revolution as a “cadre” party narrowly focused on workers, the task was to create solidarity and foster democratic sentiments aligned with socialism among all social classes. Against the notion that worker self-mobilization would come about solely by seizing power, Weber argues that political education and political action in every possible way was the only practical route to meaningful socialism. While not yet advocating for a utopia, Weber committed himself to realism that still held on to a radical form of hope.

I think it is extremely important to highlight that Weber's politics was understood by James as a reversion to a form of nineteenth-century utopia––meant pejoratively. This clues us into a more general point about Weber's transition from Trotskyism to a more libertarian form of socialism in wrestling with the extent to which the push for a democratic politics of “content and values,” premised on a utopian impulse, was indeed still revolutionary. In response to James’ charge of utopianism, Weber classified James as a petty-bourgeois utopian instead. Yet, Weber did not reject utopianism wholesale, and as we will see, it opened a new channel for him to resignify his project as the “great” utopia outside of the narrow constraints of US Trotskyism.

Weber and the re-politicization of utopia

After several years of heated debate in the WP and after the end of the war, Weber turned a new leaf and left the party. Building up a transnational network of other disillusioned comrades from Germany, Britain, Switzerland, and South Africa, he initiated a new political formation called “The Movement for a Democracy of Content” that would publish a quarterly magazine. In 1947, they published the first issue of the German magazine Dinge der Zeit out of Cologne, and in 1948 they published the English version as Contemporary Issues (CI) out of London.

Some of Weber's comrades from his time in France helped establish the London group, which became the main site for publishing the English version of the magazine. These included other exiled Trotskyists such as Fritz Besser, Max Laufer, Ulrich Jacobs, and Pierre Watter. Notably, Besser was Ernest Mandel’s childhood piano teacher during the war in Antwerp, and is fondly remembered by Mandel as the man who “molded him into a Marxist” (Mandel quoted in Stutje, 2009: 9). The group brought in several South African anti-apartheid activists (E.V. Swart and Issy Pinchuk) who were living in London then Johannesburg, as well as some comrades in Switzerland. The group of younger activists in New York City around Weber included Murray Bookchin, Beatrice Bookchin (née Appelstein), Bob Eisen, Jack and Mina Grossman, and Phil MacDougal.

The group's notion of “contemporary issues” and the democracy of “content” was polysemous. Talking about current affairs was meant to spark a much wider debate and politicize socialist attitudes by reshaping the author and reader through self-education, exchange, and in defense of their ideas (and in the group's own inner-circle discussions). The way the group thought about the shape of a democracy of “content” also had multiple meanings. Ironically, the content was understood as “substance,” that is, the joining of theory and practice in the collective management of social relations, but also as “satisfaction,” that is, the realistic and contextual acceptance of a plurality of views centered around a core rejection of capitalism, domination, and “private” control. ¹ Weber had learned from his experiences in the IKD: a principle of compromise was needed for an effective political movement, especially one that was supposed to update Marxism for the twentieth century.

In the late 1940s, Weber's catastrophism was infused with new metaphors and examples of decline. The group read William Vogt's Our Plundered Planet (1948) and published Phil MacDougal's response, which critically reviewed the book (MacDougal, 1949). Weber found the space allotted to Marxism in MacDougal's treatment lacking and was keen on developing a response that could more adequately theorize the impact of capitalism on the relationship between organisms and their environments. Subsequently, he published a manifesto for the group, titled the “Great Utopia” (1950), extending many of the organicist metaphors from his earlier work to include more serious questions of environmental crisis, medicine, and human health. But more than that, it was a living project meant to theoretically orient the group's working existence.

The document was living because it contained a series of theses meant to be continually elaborated in discussion, reformulated, and adapted to the specifics of a given context. It signified the utopian impulse of a fully liberated, anti-hierarchical, and anti-bureaucratic society, but did not dictate its configuration. For Weber, the Great Utopia (GU) was the dream of humanity overcoming scarcity that remained unfulfilled until the advent of the industrial revolution (van der Linden, 2001; Weber, 1950: 3). Retrogressive capitalist development thus explained how the existence of actual conditions of material abundance did not translate into the overcoming of scarcity. Instead, barbarism had manifested in the continuation––not the end––of the Second World War.

Thus, the GU offered a distinct account of time and politics (cf. Kelly, 2022) because it evaluated existing decay and retrogression by reevaluating war, technological change, and all class-based forms of political mobilization. If war was the “mode of existence” of bourgeois society, any hope of fighting a “last war” remained an illusion, only creating the need for further struggle over world domination. In this document, we find war described as the continuous temporal frame reproduced by a society committed to antagonisms of “us and them.” In fact, what wartime had done was to transform “the ever extending ‘I or You’ of free competition into the monopolist slogan of ‘We or You’” (Weber, 1950: 8). It is the perception of the inevitability of war that socially reproduces binaries between great powers and thus mystifies the needs of those affected by the war economy. Chronological, instrumental war time is normalized and thus contributes to the further obfuscation of retrogressive development in society. A radical utopianism was therefore needed that would not only theorize with this new temporal, and as Weber also emphasized, planetary political problem, but embody a practical stance, too.

Only a Marxist theory could diagnose this self-destructive element of capitalism and offer solutions. Yet, the Marxist emphasis on class analysis was obsolete in a world where the workers’ movement would “never rise again” (Weber, 1950: 5). But what kind of political form could create a society that could produce and consume beyond class divisions? And how was this to be achieved? The new political formation would not have property, bureaucracy, or leaders. To achieve the GU, what was needed was extensive research, experience in process-based philosophy and science, and manifold agitations and experiments in social organizing within the United States because of its central position in world politics. The voluntary nature of social relations of production and consumption was especially important (Weber, 1950: 16). This was an experiment in political organization against the rule of the proletariat, representing a utopian project of “building a new world in the heart of the old, in the ordinary sense, as a foreshadowing” (Kinna, 2017: 202).

The GU also outlined a Marxist theory of social metabolism to explain the imbalance, unequal exchange, and disruption of natural processes and their effects on human health. In revisiting some of the themes already raised in the group by Phil MacDougal, Weber explored a Marxist response to the problem of the environment. This involved calculating how the American economy and local participation could redistribute its resources in a more equitable and environmental way. While he emphasized the profit-motive as driving these effects, especially in creating the compulsory conditions for uneven development, he equally highlighted the centrality of environmental impacts caused by retrogressive development. Only a new, decentralized political form could account for the environmental impact of capitalism (Weber, 1950: 10–11).

We may also read the GU as a resignification of the pejorative utopian label prominent in authoritarian socialist movements. On the one hand, we may read this as a dialectical resignification of utopia or a détournement, where “theoretical consciousness of dialectical movement, which must itself bear the stamp of that movement, is manifested by the reversal of established relationships between concepts” (Debord, 1995: 144). Here, the particular cultural practice within Marxism of deriding utopian socialism is hijacked to invoke the spirit of the “great” nineteenth-century socialist utopias Marx himself was inspired by Leopold (2005).

On the other hand, we might interpret the GU, not as resignification, but as empty signification, following Ernesto Laclau, where an “empty signifier can consequently only emerge if there is a structural impossibility in signification is such, and only if this impossibility can signify itself as an interruption (subversion, distortion, etc.) of the structure of the sign” (Laclau, 1996: 37). The GU was empty in the sense that it did not create a blueprint for the future, albeit creating a new space for envisioning the possibility of a different future (cf. Newman, 2009: 216).

The similarity of the GU with the council communist tradition is also striking (see Muldoon, 2021). However, a closer look at the archival evidence demonstrates a crucial difference. CI had indeed corresponded with the major theorist of councilism at the time, Anton Pannekoek (1873–1960), and associated through the London group with pioneers of worker's control. Pannekoek seems to have read the GU and sent the CI group a copy of his recently published book as well as an article on councils, which he thought they could publish.

Likely to Pannekoek's astonishment, the CI group rejected Pannekoek's article in a letter from 23 January 1950. They tell him:

From the Utopia you must have gathered that we have decisively broken away from the old proletarian conceptions by which the “workers” are to be organized into “councils” etc. Your article which is nothing more than the reiteration of the old conception therefore does not interest us (Swart, 1950b).

Weber and the group's own perception was that the vision of the GU was different from the council: it claimed a radically new politics.

Over the next several years in the pages of CI, there was a lively debate on the meaning and practicability of the GU. In the first criticism of the utopia laid out by other members of CI, the main charge is at the level of the political coordination required by the utopia (Jackson and Davidson, 1950). The main problem identified here reproduces some of the criticism we saw earlier with James: if democracy is to be supported, what prevents the democracy of content from being subverted by a capitalist democracy of the majority? These authors claimed that once again we were left with the question of leadership, and they argued that a vanguard is necessary for any lasting change to be affected in society.

Here, Weber's South African comrade Swart responded to this first criticism. Swart studied literature in Cambridge and was active in anti-apartheid politics in the 1950s, especially in his organization for the 1957 Alexandra bus boycott (Phahle, 2019). He was also a major financial supporter of CI. In his response to Weber's first critics, Swart argued that they were still caught up in the bureaucratic, vanguardist logic of past political parties and missed the point of the movement: “The fundamental error here is that of visualizing a “Party” which shall “lead the future society” whereas the party in actuality dissolves itself definitely into that society” (Swart, 1950a: 187). Swart's interpretation of the GU was to even reject “visualizing” the political form the group was propagating.

The second criticism regarded the actual transition to a democracy of content, especially questioning the notion that scarcity had been overcome in society as it was in the 1950s (Ascot, 1952). The criticism here was leveled at the post-revolutionary situation, which would require a high level of (potential) central planning and a considerable amount of time. What was at stake was whether the social analysis was correct (is scarcity overcome?), and even if was, how to protect against falling back into a vanguardism? The problem of a “dictatorship of the majority” would resurface once again until conditions beyond scarcity could be evenly distributed throughout the world (Ascot, 1952: 105).

Weber's solution was to point to the history of “dictatorship” associated with former revolutionary movements (Weber, 1952). What he contends is that a dictatorship of the proletariat, posed as a matter of leadership, fails to realize that the dictatorship will remain a minority ruling class position. Capitalism itself, Weber argued, is a form of minority rule, where goods are produced to be consumed by a minority. But majority rule is likewise a misleading concept because it depends on the exclusion of a minority to constitute itself as an economy of production for profit. Here, the GU was more than a “utopia of reason,” it was an organizational concept that politicized social life to embody an economy of production for the satisfaction of all of mankind's needs.

A final criticism came directly from Phil MacDougal, who had previously written about environmental questions in CI. MacDougal's criticism was not centered on the existence of an environmental crisis per se, but rather on the use of Marxist theory to draw scientific conclusions about cancer. While the GU contained in it a critique of the effects of the profit-motive on agriculture, it was accompanied by the very lofty claim that artificial cultivation explained the increase in “heart diseases, cancer, infantile paralysis, mental disorders, etc.” (Weber, 1950: 7 supra note 4). The citations offered to explain this increase in “production diseases” were several esoteric studies of human health and native American medicine. This was what MacDougal took issue with, and he challenged Weber to provide more evidence, drawing attention, especially to the merit of invoking Justus Liebig as an authority because of Liebig's own Promethean commitments to artificial fertilizer techniques (MacDougal, 1951: 36–37).

This is also where the early Bookchin started to carve out his space as a major commentator of environmental politics in the United States, engaging more directly with ecologists and cancer scientists (Fenner, 2025a). Biehl has argued that Bookchin was motivated by Weber to respond to MacDougal (Biehl, 2015: 67). One of the problems Weber identified with MacDougal's treatment of artificial fertilizers was his own Promethean impulse, whereas MacDougal argued that neo-Malthusians failed to see the technological possibilities afforded by the chemistry industry in providing for enough food to meet the needs of “overpopulation” (MacDougal, 1949: 244). Indeed, Bookchin explored many of these themes in his early work for CI, providing evidence for the cancerous effects of food additives and the dangerous consequences of fertilizers on soil metabolism (Bookchin, 1952, 1955).

In Weber's response article to these environmental issues debated in CI, Weber continued to defend the deep connection between “land cancer” and human cancer already articulated in the GU. While he pointed to Bookchin's findings from studying the ecologists, he explicitly mentions those key passages of Capital where Marx describes soil depletion (Weber, 1960: 222). I interpret Weber's intentions as wishing to connect his retrogression thesis with Marx's idea that capitalist development is always simultaneously mirrored by a process of destruction (Marx, 1976: 638). This is also how Michael Löwy describes the eco-socialist impulse, as “an attempt to provide a radical civilizational alternative to what Marx called capitalism's ‘destructive progress’” (Löwy, 2015: 19).

For this reason, Weber also argues (pace Marx): if capitalist progress simultaneously undermines the origins of all wealth, that is, the soil and the worker, “the most underdeveloped countries, from the point of view of rational agriculture, are the advanced countries” (Weber, 1961: 265). Including questions of agriculture and human health in the GU is meant to purposefully enable a discussion of society's relationship to the earth as a “materialistic concept” because it is one of the “preconditions of the welfare of everybody” (Weber, 1960: 234). By the end of his life, Weber worried that capitalism's domination of nature would disrupt the “life-cycle” to such an extent that humans would not be able to intervene or repair nature, even with miraculous technology (Weber, 1960: 238). The inclusion of claims in the utopia about human health and the detrimental effects of the capitalist economy, Weber tells us, was exactly meant to be continually reassessed and drawn upon as a source of political imagination and provocation.

A closer look at the distance between Weber and the Frankfurt School helps clarify the politicality of the GU. While Weber held the Frankfurt School in high regard and was deeply influenced by their work, I interpret his engagement with Max Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason (1947) as an important aspect of the politics of utopia refracted in the GU. Why focus on Horkheimer's lectures at Columbia University and not on other similarities with the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)? The Eclipse of Reason is the main reference in Weber's writing, which points to either the unavailability of other work, purposeful censorship, or a third possibility: Weber was caught in the Frankfurt School's “crosstown traffic” with the New York Intellectuals (Wheatland, 2009) and likely attended, or at the very least discussed, Horkheimer's lectures in 1944. It was in the air. For these reasons, I leave other works to the side, yet they do not change the political distance I wish to claim.

In his book, Horkheimer distinguished between subjective and objective theories of rationality. Where the former concerns our ability to co-ordinate the correct means to a given end, the latter connotes the idealist abstraction of formalizing a set of ultimately valid ends. Utopias constitute a version of this kind of objective rationality, according to Horkheimer, and he argued that Liberalism is “the sponsor of a Utopia that had come true, needing little more than the smoothing out of a few troublesome wrinkles” (Horkheimer, 1947: 139). What this means is that science, especially in the form of new technological capabilities, can unjustifiably pursue improvement, progress, and change divorced from social conditions. And in the realm of labor, the formalization of rationality leads to a heightened form of commodification that makes productiveness an end in itself (Horkheimer, 1947: 41). What was Horkheimer's solution to this problem of means and ends? Philosophical theory.

It must have deeply troubled Weber to hear that all that was left to do for the anti-Stalinist Left was to be “mankind's memory and conscience, and thereby help to keep the course of humanity from resembling the meaningless round of the asylum inmate's recreation hour” (Horkheimer, 1947: 186). This, I argue, constituted a dividing line in the politics of utopia in the shaping of the GU. The Frankfurt School depoliticized utopianism by arguing that it was “blocked” by the dehumanization of idealism's objective rationality. This is, of course, part of the historical claim made together with Theodor Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which Horkheimer acknowledges at the end of his lectures as a parament to his argument.

Yet, Weber challenges this grand historical claim by questioning whether the “great service” that philosophical theory provides is sufficient. Critical theory, here, becomes ideologically distorted because it forecloses the possibility of meaningful political practice from the beginning. If deciding whether technological progress creates enlightenment or barbarism hinges on “our ability to interpret accurately the profound changes now taking place in the public mind and in human nature” (Horkheimer quoted in Weber, 1957: 479), we get tangled once again within a web of mystifications. For Weber, these reified concepts of the “public mind” and “human nature” are used by Horkheimer as the key to figuring out how to “rule the majority,” just as much as his liberal opponents.

Instead, Weber thinks that the GU can provide practical solutions to humanity's own descent into barbarism and not simply “ideological” or “philosophical” reasons. It intervenes to change the world of its participants with a process-philosophy, where man's “nature is the nature of his environment––should he want to change it he must begin by changing the conditions on which he depends” (Weber, 1950: 15). For Weber, new modes of direct action, radically democratic organization, and economic planning were required to face this immense task, and the CI group was particularly inspired to follow through with this project after the events of 1956 (Fenner, 2025b). In his later writing, Weber demanded the ruthless suspicion and critique of all justifications of power that depended on the “public” or “political majority” for validity. In that sense, Weber's utopianism caters to the minority: it seeks to counteract what he thinks of as the special law of “the dwindling force of cognition in bourgeois society,” which affects everybody still connected with the official, public mind (Weber, 1957: 480). This is the GU's counter- or alternative public sphere, which resists the all-encompassing, bourgeois mode of existence. Even Horkheimer, Weber argues, is still committed to abiding by an official logic of appropriateness within the bourgeois public sphere.

This represents a particular environmental understanding of the relationship between humans and their surroundings. It generates a political judgment and normative critique of society based on the impact that social habits have on the individual. Paralleling the radical realists (Aytac and Rossi, 2023; Prinz and Rossi, 2017; Raekstad, 2018a), Weber's critique of ideological distortion––the “dwindling force of cognition”––originates in the uncritical acceptance of beliefs from a given hierarchical order. Even further, if the outcome of political action depends on the habits of those engaged in practice, then philosophical change will not be sufficient: Agents will need to be embedded in ways of everyday life that reflect those very ends that wish to be obtained in theory. Thus, Weber re-politicizes utopia by arguing that the coordination of subjective means to an objective end does not necessarily entail domination by the objective end (cf. Sande, 2024). This persistent utopian impulse can be realized in a piecemeal fashion through political organization at the lowest possible level, for example, in a constellation such as the CI group.

In sum, the means reflect the ends in the GU because it can already “anticipate the organization of the future society in all essentials, that is, it must manifest the outlines in skeletal form” (Weber, 1950: 15). Against the Trotskyite and Frankfurt School anti-utopians, Weber, therefore, not only hijacks utopia and frames it as an empty signifier, but he revolutionizes the political imagination by rethinking the relationship between means and ends. This is clearly an example of what Carl Boggs would later call “prefiguration” (Boggs, 1977), an altogether different form of rationality that opposed both Marxist-Leninism and Social Democracy.

Realism between eco-socialism and prefiguration

In his original 1977 essay, which pioneered the concept of “prefigurative strategy,” Carl Boggs argued that libertarian, anti-authoritarian forms of revolutionary socialism are concerned with the “fear of reproducing hierarchical authority relations under a new ideological rationale,” challenging the centralized form of power exhibited by parties and unions because of how they undermine revolutionary struggles, and “democratization through local, collective structures that anticipate the future liberated society” (Boggs, 1977: 103). Prefigurative forms of politics act to overturn all modes of domination, and not simply private property by reconfiguring how we reproduce the institutions of society directly.

Weber's vision of the GU was surely a form of prefigurative strategy by Boggs’ standards, especially if one considers Weber's consistent aspiration for praxis to be anti-bureaucratic and anti-hierarchical, as opposed to traditional forms of organization such as parties and unions, and in favor of radical democratization through truly popular control. Here, Weber's postwar project anticipates the “strategic commitment to developing revolutionary organizations that embody the structures of deliberation and decision-making that a post-capitalist society contain” (Raekstad, 2018b: 363). He invites us to take stock of the existing situation first, question its ideological character (with the help of the theses laid out in the GU), and enact a microcosmic space of freedom outside of capitalist domination. Furthermore, as we saw from the discussion that ensued within the CI group, the critique of prefigurativism was dealt with systematically. Their discussion is similar (but not identical) to Raekstad and Gradin's defense of prefiguration against the charges of (a) lacking social analysis, (b) insularity (i.e., the majority problem), and (c) the fragmentation of the left (Raekstad and Gradin, 2020: 133–151). All these themes are anticipated in the politics of utopia in Weber's thought, and they lie at the heart of the GU's construction as a living document.

Crucially, I emphasize the living, textual shape of GU as a major resource for a contemporary prefigurative eco-socialism. To clarify, this is not a “form-based” conception of utopia that constructs the image of a perfect future. Instead, the GU was a “content-based” approach to filling the gap between experience and expectation under conditions of technological possibility. Following Mathias Thaler's reading of Raymond Geuss, this is what distinguishes the utopian thought of Gustav Landauer, where

The task of utopian speculation as not to construct the image of a possible perfect world but as a focused study of those human desires and needs that continue to torment us but are incapable of being satisfied under present social circumstances (Geuss quoted in Thaler, 2018: 680).

Here, the shape of the GU is more than a manifesto. It is the animation of the possibility of another world.

Moreover, the shape of the GU pays attention to creating a common framework for agonistic politics that can change social consciousness under the repressive conditions of environmental crisis. However, Weber rejected creating an exact vision of future society, rather, the GU was meant to “anticipate” the organization of the future society. Weber's refusal to create a blueprint for the future resonates with Marx and Engels’ own discontent with utopian socialism. Yet, as David Leopold has demonstrated, their charge was not directed at the underlying utopian impulse of Charles Fourier or Saint Simon's socialism, but rather at the later projects that tried to spell out exactly how society was to look like (Leopold, 2005).

By capturing those central motifs and fault lines of the postwar era, Weber's utopia thus plays a critical role where “[c]riticism of the system is not only permitted but is absolutely necessary as a safety-valve against too much pressure from within” (Weber, 1957: 487). Weber's ideas resonate with contemporary theorists of utopianism and its place in political theorizing, where utopia “functions as a compensatory safety-valve for those suffering under the duress of grievous social inequality and exploitation” (Claeys, 2013: 149). This was especially clear in the role that environmental crisis played in the CI group's discussion, exactly because it was politicized through the GU.

However, if we think with Miguel Abensour, the GU was not an “eternal utopia” appealing to perfect order, but rather a “persistent” utopia that enabled a politics of radical alterity or the “ever-reborn movement toward something indeterminate” (Abensour, 2008: 407). Indeed, that was the effect we saw the GU had on its readers. It expressed a radical otherness. Recall that it even went so far as to reject council communism, arguably closest to its own desired working existence. Instead, Weber enshrined in the GU the sentiment that the postwar world was indeed radically different from earlier times with its retrogressive development, new imperialist tendencies, and environmental crisis.

Contemporary theorists worry about the place of utopianism in eco-socialism (Albert, 2023). Equally, they worry that, unlike state-centered approaches, prefigurative strategy cannot guarantee ecological sensibility or provide appropriate and effective solutions (Harvey, 2012: 70). While Di Mauro acknowledges that these eco-socialist debates largely reproduce older ideological fractures that hinge on the role of the state in achieving success (Engel-Di Mauro, 2024: 69), examples of eco-socialist projects that draw on prefigurative strategy tend to focus narrowly on the Zapatistas or the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Engel-Di Mauro, 2022: 8). Weber's postwar utopianism complicates this picture, not because these were eco-socialist “success” stories akin to these latter examples. Rather, the case of Weber demonstrates how eco-socialism might leverage the utopian tradition to embed ecological sensibility in a prefigurative strategy. It does so through the unique living shape of the GU and the requirement of the group to critique all forms of hierarchically produced claims to power.

Weber's approach thus offers a very useful and “realist” model of prefigurative eco-socialism. For the remainder of this section, I wish to provide one example of how reading Weber's approach in parallel with radical realism helps clarify the ongoing politics of utopia in eco-socialist debates. In particular, I am interested in challenging Albert's (2023) call for a “realist utopian” eco-socialism. Albert argues that if all eco-socialists are committed to prioritizing use-value over exchange value, collective ownership and planning, and transformations in consumption patterns (Albert, 2023: 13), then eco-socialist theories should offer concrete––as opposed to abstract––visions of the future. It is argued that we are beyond the need for regulative ideals. If eco-socialism contains a utopian element, then it lies solely in developing plausible revolutionary scenarios based on evidence, and these may even permit some level of authoritarian practice, too (Albert, 2023: 22). The great strength of Albert's “realist” utopianism is its fidelity to the facts. Instead of offering wishlists and unrealistic proposals for change at some point in the future, eco-socialists should develop normative arguments for change based on actual strategies for achieving said change.

However, Albert's approach challenges interstitial (and by extension prefigurative) eco-socialisms for their inability to create critical mass, again reproducing the “majority problem.” He remains committed to a state-centered Green New Deal and the hope that “eco-socialists and allied movements may one day assume power” (Albert, 2023: 27). This analysis, I contend, reproduces a much more widespread problem in the eco-socialist literature, namely of systematically sidelining prefigurative strategy. Furthermore, his understanding of “realist” utopianism misses the radical realist approach entirely (Brinn, 2020; Raekstad, 2018a; Rossi, 2019).

I believe that eco-socialist theory might benefit from a more engaged reading of other forms of these realist utopianisms, especially the case of Weber's political program. I do not have the space here to provide a full comparison of Weber's affinity with radical realism. Nevertheless, we encountered important parallels between Weber and the practice of developing non-moralized judgments only if they follow from a critical appraisal of how they are hierarchically produced (Aytac and Rossi, 2023: 1216). For both Weber and radical realists, utopian thinking comes into the picture when we consider the question of what kinds of political prescriptions should guide political action. Raekstad argues that ambitious utopian theory goes beyond feasibility constraints and helps disrupt legitimation stories to create new forms of political agency (Raekstad, 2020: 550). This is the “playful” nature of utopia, suspended between the “place where everything is good, the place of bliss (Eutopia), and the place of nowhere (Ou-topia)” (Abensour, 2008: 406). Rossi contends that radical realism is “outopian” because its normativity is negative (Rossi, 2019: 645). Realist utopianism acknowledges that an ideal society is unattainable, except in microcosmic and provisional autonomous zones that create the space for epistemic ideology critique. This offers a rather different version of “realist utopianism” from what Albert proposed, and something closer to what Weber pioneered in the postwar years. For the radical realists, fidelity to the facts is also key, but that does not rule out prefigurative strategy.

One might object that radical realists lack the ability to embed an ecological sensibility into the critical process of debunking legitimation stories. Here, our analysis of the GU might help motivate a solution. Consider a “radical realist” utopian eco-socialism that adopts a prefigurative strategy. Moving beyond standard criticism of prefigurativism, state-centered eco-socialists might still worry that ecological sensibility is not necessarily tied to the project. Ecology, so the critique might go, is not integral to this utopian eco-socialism. On the one hand, a minimalist response would be to suggest that radical realism does not need to be necessarily tied to ecology to still persistently include ecological considerations in the critical epistemic work offered by the genealogy. Just as much as environmental concern was central to the GU, today climate change and inevitable ecological disruption are even more salient and supported by a solid scientific consensus. Ecological concerns will necessarily be subject to any non-moralized critique of existing power structures. On the other hand, a maximalist response might suggest that debunking the hierarchical myths of our current democratic environmental regimes (Daggett, 2021) is where a radical realist eco-socialism would need to begin.

In sum, this is the kind of critical work that Weber and the CI group started doing in the postwar years. The GU was a living document that functioned as a microcosmic platform for debunking epistemically flawed justifications prevalent in the popular media of postwar America. This was the point of publishing their magazine, but also of engaging in research on how to plan a more rational economy to confront the irrational destruction of the planet (Fenner, 2025b). The project parallels a radical realist approach to utopianism by pointing to the “no-place” thinking of the GU. Yet importantly, Weber incorporates ecological awareness into the Great “eutopia” by encoding the politics of environmental crisis into the document. Building on the GU, Murray Bookchin would pioneer a pathbreaking genealogy of “epistemologies of rule” in The Ecology of Freedom (1982). While different from Weber, both depart from similar Trotskyite origins and a postwar concern with environmental crisis. Here, both eco-socialists and radical realists could benefit from adopting Weber's living document approach to utopian thinking, vindicating the place of prefigurative strategy in a contemporary ecological struggle. If we wish to broaden our eco-socialist repertoire and develop institutional practices that facilitate the diagnosis of circularities in the self-justification of power relations, analyzing Weber's GU and its legacy helps us vindicate the “success” of this sort of enterprise.

Conclusion

This article explored Josef Weber's utopian thought to highlight the innovative and unique ways that wartime Marxism, democratic theory, and a deep concern for explaining the origins of environmental degradation were developed in the 1930s to 1950s. I excavated archival material from Weber's time in French and American exile to better understand why he sought to reframe his political project as utopian. I argued that through his debate with C.L.R. James, Weber was challenged to explicate the anti-authoritarian vision underlying his writing during the war. This pushed him to stake out a more radical democratic theory of revolutionary struggle, which pushed him beyond party politics.

Furthermore, I examined Weber's writing for the transnational CIs group, which I read as a response to his experience with US Trotskyism. Their “movement for a democracy of content” built on Weber's founding utopian manifesto, which I subsequently analyzed, focusing on its temporal, prefigurative, and environmental dimensions. By looking at Weber's interaction with Max Horkheimer, I added nuance to the meaning of utopianism, suggesting that the politics of utopia in this context hinged on the Frankfurt School's political shortcomings. The role of environmental crisis in the re-politicization of utopia is also explored as an untapped version of eco-socialism. In a final section, I discussed why the case of Weber not only refines our understanding of how to think about postwar utopianism, but it challenges us to be more experimental in how we conceptualize the space between eco-socialism and prefigurative strategy. An example of how parallel concerns might be connected to Weber's project, I suggested, lay in the radical realist approach to utopianism.

Future research, however, is needed to better understand Weber's reception. His interaction with C.L.R. James and the Facing Reality group could more fully be investigated, especially as James would make a similar pivot away from Trotskyism in the 1960s. His influence on American Situationism could also serve as an interesting avenue of research. Furthermore, the CIs group's critique of the Frankfurt School could be extended to other figures, such as Ernst Bloch, Herbert Marcuse, and Franz Neumann, all of which were greatly appreciated but also came under fire in the pages of the magazine. Equally, connections to French Trotskyism could be explored, especially the Socialisme ou Barbarisme group. Taken together, these publishing collectives have asserted a significant influence on the contemporary radical democratic imaginary. If we wish to place these ideas in a more global context, the largely unknown work of Weber will surely play a role in this endeavor.